“WAR IS HELL but there are things worse than Hell, as every Negro knows.” W. E. B. Du Bois had a knack for packaging the complex feelings of Black folk into words. After World War I cut off immigration from Europe, labor recruiters from northern industries headed into southern towns searching for a new labor supply. Even if The Birth of a Nation had never appeared before excited southern audiences, southern Blacks would probably have still been all ears to northern industrial recruiters.1
Then again, southern Blacks did not need these recruiters to entice them to escape a place that in some ways was worse than hell. During the Great War, Black people once again used their legs as activism, escaping from rural towns to southern cities, from southern cities to border-state cities, and from border-state cities to northern cities in what became known as the “Great Migration.” In the first mass antiracist movement of the twentieth century, migrants eschewed beliefs in the New South’s racial progress, in the notion of Jim Crow being better than slavery, and in the claim that Blacks’ political-economic plight was their fault. Segregationists tried to slow the migration through racist ideas, ideas put into action when they terrorized northern labor recruiters, when they arrested migrants, and even when they tried to improve labor conditions. But nothing and no one could stop this movement.
When migrants reached northern cities, they faced the same discrimination they thought they had left behind, and they heard the same racist ideas. The Black and White natives of northern cities looked down on the migrants and their different (though equal) southern or rural cultural ways as culturally backward. They looked at their families as dysfunctional. And they called these migrants, who had moved hundreds of miles seeking work and a better life, lazy.
In 1918, Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson, who had just founded the first Black history journal and professional association, correctly predicted that “the maltreatment of Negroes will be nationalized.” Migrants faced segregation in the northern “receiving stations,” as journalist Isabel Wilkerson termed them in 2010. Racist Harlemites, for instance, organized to fight off what they called the “a growing menace” of “black hordes,” and ended up segregating their communities. Over the course of six decades, some 6 million Black southerners left their homes, transforming Black America from a primarily southern population to a national and urban one, and segregationist ideas became nationalized and urbanized in the process.2
The Great Migration overshadowed a smaller migration of people from the Caribbean and Africa to the United States. A young, well-read, charismatic Jamaican with a passion for African people and an understanding of racism arrived in New York in March 1916 to raise funds for a school in Jamaica. Seeking out Du Bois, the stocky, dark-skinned Marcus Mosiah Garvey visited the New York offices of the NAACP. Du Bois was absent, and Garvey was “unable to tell whether he was in a white office or that of the NAACP.” The plethora of White and biracial assimilationists on the NAACP’s staff, and all the biracial assimilationists in leadership positions in Black America, no doubt contributed to Garvey’s decision to remain in Harlem and build his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there. His organizing principles were global African solidarity, the beauty of dark skin and African American culture, and global African self-determination. “Africa for the Africans,” he liked to say. His UNIA quickly attracted antiracists, Black working people, and Black migrants and immigrants who did not like the colorism, class racism, assimilationism, and nativism of the NAACP and the Talented Tenth.3
Marcus Garvey and his admirers were not the only people observing the growing population and power of biracial Americans. Scholars were taking note. Two years after Garvey’s jarring visit to the NAACP’s headquarters, sociologist and eugenicist Edward Bryon Reuter finished The Mulatto in the United States (1918). From his base at the University of Iowa, Reuter made a name for himself arguing that anything Black people achieved was in fact the achievement of biracial people. He situated biracial people as a sort of racial middle class, below superior Whites, but above inferior “full Blacks,” as they were called. (Biracial people often rejected the racist idea of their inferiority to Whites, but some consumed and reproduced the racist idea of their superiority to Blacks.) Reuter stamped biracial people as a “peculiar people”—despite their success—around the same time that homosexuals were being marked as a “peculiar people.”4
Reuter reinforced the fundamentally racist idea that biracial people were abnormal. Homosexuals, like biracial people, also were considered abnormal, and the two were sometimes considered in the same breath as “peculiar people” situated in an in-between state. “Between the whitest of men and the blackest negro stretches out a vast line of intermediary races,” proclaimed one of the earlier advocates of homosexual rights, Xavier Mayne, in The Intersexes (1908). “Nature abhors the absolute, delights in . . . the half-steps, the between-beings.” Passing bisexuals and biracial people quietly disrupted the so-called normality of heterosexuality and racial purity.5
Eugenicists promoting the need for maintaining the purity of the White race endlessly berated interracial reproduction. In an explosive wartime book published in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race, New York lawyer Madison Grant constructed a racial-ethnic ladder with Nordics (the new term for Anglo-Saxons) at the top and Jews, Italians, the Irish, Russians, and all non-Whites on lower rungs. He reconstructed a world history of rising and falling civilizations based on the “amount of Nordic blood in each nation.” “[The] races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically,” Grant suggested. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” This segregationist passionately told assimilationists that their efforts were bound to fail. Black people were incapable of development and could not become White. Grant revised and reissued his book three times in five years and it was translated into several foreign languages. Publishers were barely able to supply the voracious demand for segregationist ideas and for the dashing eugenicist movement as White theorists attempted to normalize the social inequities of the day.6
When Germany surrendered in the Great War, an embittered Austrian soldier sprinted into German politics, where he gained some cheers for his nasty speeches against Marxists and Jews. In 1924, Adolf Hitler was jailed for an attempted revolution. He used the time in prison—and Madison Grant’s book—to write his magnum opus, Mein Kampf. “The highest aim of human existence is . . . the conservation of race,” Hitler famously wrote. The Nazi czar later thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called “my Bible.”7
Eugenicist ideas also became part of the fledgling discipline of psychology and the basis of newly minted standardized intelligence tests. Many believed these tests would prove once and for all the existence of natural racial hierarchies. In 1916, Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman and his associates “perfected” the IQ test based on the dubious theory that a standardized test could actually quantify and objectively measure something as intricate and subjective and varied as intelligence across different experiential groups. The concept of general intelligence did not exist. When scholars tried to point out this mirage, it seemed to be as much in the eye of the beholder as general beauty, another nonexistent phenomenon. But Terman managed to make Americans believe that something that was inherently subjective was actually objective and measurable. Terman predicted that the IQ test would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.” Standardized tests became the newest “objective” method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination, and a multimillion-dollar testing industry quickly developed in schools and workplaces.8
IQ tests were administered to 1.75 million soldiers in 1917 and 1918. American Psychological Association president and Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham used the results of the army intelligence tests to conjure up a genetic intellectual racial hierarchy, and a few years later, he constructed the SAT test for college admissions. White soldiers scored better, and for Brigham that was because of their superior White blood. African Americans in the North scored better than African Americans in the South, and Brigham argued that northern Blacks had a higher concentration of White blood, and that these genetically superior African Americans had sought better opportunities up North because of their greater intelligence.9
AN ARMISTICE SIGNED on November 11, 1918, ended the fighting in World War I. It took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference for colonial powers to come to an agreement on the Treaty of Versailles. W. E. B. Du Bois ventured to Paris in 1918 and sent back gripping letters and editorials to The Crisis. He shared the racism faced by Black soldiers, adding to the wartime press reports filled with stories of Black heroism. But this storyline of Black heroism changed in White newspapers to the storyline of Black deficiency when the officers, who were disproportionately White and southern, returned to the United States and began telling their own war stories to reporters. As a collection, Du Bois’s Parisian dispatches and activities displayed his lingering double-consciousness of assimilationism and antiracism. Du Bois witnessed steadily fierce opposition among the victors at the Paris Peace Conference to granting independence to colonial peoples. In “Reconstruction and Africa,” published in the February 1919 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois rejected, in antiracist fashion, the notion that Europe was the “Benevolent Civilizer of Africa.” He declared, “White men are merely juggling with words—or worse—when they declare that the withdrawal of Europe from Africa will plunge the continent into chaos.” On the other assimilationist hand, Du Bois helped organize the First Pan-African Congress that month in Paris, which called on the Paris Peace Conference to adopt “gradual” decolonization and civil rights. Du Bois desired a “chance for peaceful and accelerated development of black folk.”10
At long last, the parties signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. The massive German state was forced to pay reparations. France, Belgium, South Africa, Portugal, and England received Germany’s prized African colonies. The League of Nations was created to rule the world. The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples. At least President Wilson was being honest. He feared that the relatively good treatment Black soldiers had received in France had “gone to their heads.” To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent inequality of segregationists. In 1919, many Black soldiers returned to their towns, with antiracist expectations, as New Negroes. And they were greeted by New Negroes, too.11
These New Negroes heeded Du Bois’s plea. “By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, long, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land,” Du Bois wrote in “We Return Fighting,” in The Crisis of May 1919. The same US Postal Service that for decades had delivered White newspapers doused in lynching kerosene refused to deliver this Crisis, judging Du Bois’s words as “unquestionably violent and extremely likely to excite a considerable amount of racial prejudice (if that has not already reached its maximum amongst the Negroes).” Du Bois’s own false 1901 construction of antiracists as being filled with revenge and anger against White people—instead of anger against racist ideas and discrimination—had finally come back to bite him. He had spent his early years urging Black people to calmly focus their efforts on their own moral uplift, on uplift suasion, to change racist minds. He had tried to provide White Americans with the scientific facts of racial disparities, and he had believed that producers of racist ideas and policies could be persuaded through reason to end their production. He had spent his early years ridiculing leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner as unwise, as violent, and as prejudiced when they had passionately called on Black people to fight. But every year, as the failures of education and persuasion and uplift piled up, Du Bois’s urgings for Black people to protest and fight became stronger and more passionate. But then, he had to face the same criticism and censorship that he had dished out to others earlier in his career. After a week’s delay, postal officials finally delivered The Crisis. They had found there were even more dangerous antiracist and socialist publications being edited by New Negroes, including Marcus Garvey’s The Negro World.
How did those Americans still packing movie houses to watch Tarzan and The Birth of a Nation, who were still spending their afternoons reading The Passing of the Great Race, or attending Klan events, or trying to segregate away Black migrants, respond to the New Negro? James Weldon Johnson described their response during that year of 1919 as the “Red Summer” for all the blood that spilled in the deadliest series of White invasions of Black neighborhoods since Reconstruction. Since racist ideas were not working on New Negroes, violence came rushing forth in at least twenty-five US cities, as if to remind the assertive New Negro of White rule. “If we must die, let it not be like hogs,” Claude McKay’s booming poem of self-defense shouted in July. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”12
Racist White newspapers, as was customary then as it is today, tended to depict the Black victims as criminals, and the White criminals as victims. Black newspapers, as was also customary after dramatic shows of self-defense, tended to play up the redemption of Black masculinity. “At last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb driven cattle,” one Black woman rejoiced in The Crisis. For racist White commentators, the Black men who supposedly instigated the Red Summer were beastly cattle; to racist Black commentators, these formerly beastly cattle, by striking back, had proven themselves to be men after all. Racist ideas inflamed both sides in the Red Summer, and gender racism came out of the smoke, especially the horrible coughing silence about all those courageous Black women who had defended their men and children and communities.13
The Wilson administration somehow conflated the Red Summer with the postwar Red Scare, blaming anticapitalists for the carnage instead of violent White racists. On September 27, 1919, 128 alienated White socialists, inspired by the recent Russian Revolution, gathered in Chicago to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). “The racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other,” the CPUSA’s program declared, sounding eerily like the founding racial program of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1903. Since then, SPA leaders, such as the party’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, had tended to say that there was “no negro question outside of the labor question.” Like their SPA predecessors, CPUSA officials would also go on to raise capitalist exploitation over racial discrimination, instead of leveling and challenging them both at once. In their incomplete reading of the world’s political economy, racism emerged out of capitalism, and therefore the problem of capitalism came before the problem of racism. The Communists theorized that if they killed capitalism, racism would die, too—not knowing that capitalism and racism had both emerged during the same long fifteenth century, and that since then, they had been mutually fortifying each other while developing separately. The Communist of the CPUSA admonished Blacks (and Whites) during the Red Summer to “realize their misery is not due to race antagonism, but the CLASS ANTAGONISM” between big business and labor.14
Big business was certainly producing and reproducing racist policies and ideas to divide and conquer the working class, decrease its labor costs, and increase its political power. However, the CPUSA downplayed or ignored the ways in which White laborers and unions were discriminating against and degrading Black laborers to increase their own wages, improve their own working conditions, and bolster their own political power. And why would White labor not continue ruling Black labor if labor gained political and economic control over capital in the United States? The Communists did not address that; nor did they address their own racist ideas during these formative years, which were pointed out by the antiracist Blacks joining their ranks. In seeking to unify the working class, CPUSA leaders focused their early recruiting efforts on racist White laborers. They refused to update Karl Marx’s scriptures to account for their deeply racialized nation in 1919. CPUSA officials typically stayed silent on what it might mean for the future of racism if a Communist revolution took place that did not simultaneously support a revolution against racism.15
W. E. B. Du Bois was inspired by the red hot summer like never before, and not just because he was excited about the New Negro, or because he started closely reading (and updating) Karl Marx. In February 1920, he put out the searing essays of Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Du Bois had wearily come to realize that the segregationist “belief that black folk are sub-human” was not based on any lack of knowledge: “It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact.” In moving away from educational persuasion, Du Bois finally began to turn instead toward a singly antiracist consciousness. But he did not quite reach it. Instead he wrote: “European culture—is it not better than any culture that arose in Africa or Asia? It is.”16
After relegating modern African and Asian cultures, Du Bois spoke out against “The Damnation of Women.” In Darkwater, Du Bois did something for Black women that was rarely done: for “their worth” and “their beauty” and “their promise, and for their hard past, I honor the women of my race,” he said. But in honoring the Black woman, he dishonored non-Black women and Black men, especially in their roles as mothers and fathers. He described one global unhappy family. “The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa,” he wrote. Nowhere was a mother’s love stronger and deeper than in Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois—the son of a single mother—not surprisingly declared, “It is mothers and mothers of mothers who seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.”17
Du Bois followed in the long line of reformers who played up in Black people what racists played down—in his case, he turned the global projection of the Black woman as the immoral anti-mother, the anti-woman, into the global projection of the Black woman as the moral super-mother, the super-woman. But whether redeeming or degrading Black women, such projections spun reality, generalizing the behavior of immoral individuals or motherly individuals, and in the process propagating racist ideas. An antiracist sketch of Black women would have depicted the same diversity of motherly and un-motherly behavior found in all equally imperfect female racial groups.
For decades, diverse sketches of Black feminine behavior had swayed heads and hips, minds and hearts, in buoyant juke joints. Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.18
FOR ALL ITS assimilationist ideas, Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil was still too well spiced with antiracism for the bland tastes of racist readers. Northern, southern, and foreign racist reviewers almost unanimously condemned the book as a bitter madman’s “hymn of racial hate,” or “what the southerner would write if he turned negro,” as the socialist Harold Laski of the London School of Economics put it. Meanwhile, the overwhelming response of Black readers, including the legions of common sharecroppers and domestics, was that it was “a milestone in the history of the Negro race,” as the Washington Bee attested. Some antiracist New Negroes did not like some of the bland moralizing and class racism of Darkwater. Yale alumnus William Ferris, the editor of Garvey’s The Negro World, said Du Bois looked down on the Black masses and their ailments “from the heights of his own greatness.”19
It was a charge hardly anyone could deny, especially after Du Bois’s views on Marcus Garvey became known. Garvey’s movement would collapse “in a short time,” Du Bois had allegedly said, and “his followers are the lowest type of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.” The reporter who published this quotation exhibiting class and ethnic racism probably caught Du Bois in a rancorous mood that August 1920. All month long, Du Bois had had to watch and listen to the massive parades and meetings of the first international convention of Garvey’s UNIA. “We shall now organize the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world into a vast organization to plant the banner of freedom on the great continent of Africa,” Garvey had blared on August 2, 1920, to the UNIA convention’s 25,000 enraptured delegates at Madison Square Garden. The bombastic convention left the activist African world in wondrous awe for months. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth, however, felt deeply threatened by Garvey’s exposure of the touchy reality of light skin privilege. “Garvey is an extraordinary leader of men,” Du Bois admitted in The Crisis at the end of 1920. But it had been a mistake for him to try to bring Caribbean color politics to the United States. “American Negroes recognized no color line in or out of the race,” Du Bois said, “and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it.”20
It was probably the silliest statement of Du Bois’s serious career. He sounded as oblivious as the racists who had angered him for decades by discounting the existence of the racial line. In denying the color line, Du Bois discounted the existence of color discrimination, in effect blaming darker Blacks for their disproportionate poverty. Du Bois had eyes. He knew light skins dominated the most desirable political and economic positions available to Blacks. In his own Talented Tenth essay in 1903, he had mentioned twenty-one present and past Black leaders, and all of them except Phillis Wheatley had been biracial. No Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Callie House appeared. He probably heard the circulating Black children’s rhyme: “If you’re white, you’re right / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow / If you’re brown, stick around / If you’re black, get back.” Du Bois knew that elite, light-skinned folks were still using brown paper bags and rulers to bar dark-skinned folks from churches, jobs, civic groups, historically Black colleges, Black fraternities and sororities, and even neighborhoods and other types of gatherings.21
Du Bois was probably not oblivious. More likely, he and his light-skinned peers felt their color privilege was threatened by discussions of colorism and color equality, not unlike Whites who felt their racial privilege threatened by discussions of racism and racial equality. And so, Du Bois copied his enemies: he used racist ideas and his punishing power to silence the antiracist challenge to color discrimination.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN Du Bois and Garvey reached its peak in the early 1920s, when they sparred over the question of interracial relations. In October 1921, President Warren G. Harding went to Birmingham to hunt up southern support, and he insisted that “racial amalgamation there cannot be.” While The Crisis reprimanded Harding for rejecting interracial relations, Garvey hailed the president for his endorsement of racial separatism. In contrast to Madison Grant’s eugenicists, who were advocating White racial purity, and opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of inferior Black blood, Garvey advocated Black racial purity, opposing interracial reproduction due to the intrusion of different White blood. Assimilationists often erroneously confused Garvey’s separatists, who actually believed in separate but equal, with segregationists, who really believed in separate but unequal. It was Garvey’s assimilationist opponents who were constructing Black integration into White spaces as progress. And these assimilationists also were conjoining Garvey’s separatist efforts of racial solidarity with segregationist efforts to maintain the racial exclusion of inferior peoples. Garvey’s assimilationist opponents failed to realize that there was nothing inherently tolerant or intolerant about Americans voluntarily separating themselves or integrating themselves. Americans routinely did separate and integrate themselves, voluntarily, based on religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, profession, class, race, and social interests. Separatist organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into segregation), if the emphasis is on excluding inferior peoples. Interracial organizing can be racist (and when it is, it turns into assimilation), if the emphasis is on elevating inferior Blacks by putting them under the auspices of superior Whites. That was Garvey’s somewhat false impression of the interracial program of the NAACP.22
Du Bois and Garvey represented a larger and nastier battle within Black America among assimilationists, antiracists, and separatists, between the classes, between natives and West Indians, between nationalists and Pan-Africanists, and between light skins and dark skins. But Garvey had a much bigger enemy trying to silence him: the US government. In June 1923, he was convicted of mail fraud. Out on bail, he ventured to Liberia—as did Du Bois. Upon his return, Du Bois’s anger and sense of privilege got the better of him when in May 1924 he called Garvey the “most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.” With his days of freedom numbered, Garvey struck back against Du Bois and the Talented Tenth when he presided over the UNIA convention that August. His antiracist affirmations had turned to blisteringly racist ridicule. Black people were “the most careless and indifferent people in the world,” Garvey proclaimed to thousands at Madison Square Garden. Appeals exhausted, six months later Garvey walked into federal prison, only to be deported three years later.23
Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”24
After passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists quickly turned back to focusing on the segregation of non-Nordics in the United States. Ironically, the act’s side effects slowed the pace of the eugenic agenda. The act reduced Nordic fears of non-Nordics taking over the country, and it energized the intellectual struggle of the assimilationists to get non-Whites to comply with White ideals of American homogeneity. The Catholic, pro-immigrant Knights of Columbus Historical Commission even financed the publication of several books focusing on the contributions of different racial and ethnic groups. These included The Germans in the Making of America (since the Germans were hated in the interwar period), The Jews in the Making of America, and Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk: The Negro in the Making of America (1924).
Unlike eugenicists and assimilationists, Du Bois desired a multiracial pluralism, where differences were acknowledged, embraced, and equalized in antiracist fashion, not graded, suppressed, and ignored. But instead of merely sharing the cultural differences of African American spirituality, artistry, and music, Du Bois graded Black people himself in racist fashion, echoing the view of the nation’s leading urban sociologist, Robert Park of the University of Chicago. The Negro was “primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake,” Park wrote. “He is, so to speak, the lady among races,” and was interested in “physical things rather than . . . subjective states and objects of introspection.” Du Bois likewise said the Negro had an unmatched sense of “sound and color,” along with “humility” and “a certain spiritual joyousness: a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason.” After all these years, Du Bois was still helping to reinforce Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ideas on the soft Black soul and the hard White mind. It seemed that nothing could erase this wholeheartedly racist idea from the mind of W. E. B. Du Bois. And when he attended a historic event in March 1924, Du Bois probably felt that his longtime advocacy of Blacks’ superior artistic gifts was finally paying off. He had hoped that Black artists could use the media and their creativity to persuade away racist ideas. Yet another faint hope in persuasion was about to fail another test.25